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April 2009

The April 19, 2009 New York Times article "The Working Forest" features David Foster, Director and his on-going effort to promote forest conservation in a responsible, scientific and historical context. This vision has been adopted and furthered by other scientists, conservation and environmental organizations and this partnership is working together to move this vision to the all of New England.

Since 1988, Harvard Forest has been a National Science Foundation Long-Term Ecological Research (LTER) site. This group of more than 25 sites studies and compares ecological processes, which typically take many years to understand, in ecosystems ranging from the arctic to the Everglades and from coral reefs to deserts. We have just produced a new brochure that reviews many of our activities within this program.

On April 23rd-26th, Harvard Forest will be hosting the annual Keystone Project training. Keystone, an effort of UMass Amherst, is an intensive three day seminar on forest ecology and management, wildlife management, land protection, and community outreach. It is designed to train landowners and community leaders in forest conservation. The goal of Keystone is to put into place in each community the people that can be a local source of information to landowners, communities, and organizations.

Former Harvard Forest student Raphael Contamin and Harvard Forest Senior Ecologist Aaron Ellison analyzed the classic lake model of Steve Carpenter and William Brock to determine how much advance warning indicators of regime shifts provide to managers interested in preventing dramatic ecosystem changes. Their analysis suggests that an indicator based on the high-frequency signal in the spectral density of the time-series of a process or parameter of interest provides reasonable advance warning (greater than simulated 20 years) of a regime shift.

Sydne Record, a Ph.D. student in the Plant Biology program at the University of Massachusetts whose dissertation research is being supervised by Harvard Forest Senior Ecologist Aaron Ellison, has received a Doctoral Dissertation Improvement Grant (DDIG) from the National Science Foundation. The DDIG will enable Sydne to expand her research on forecasting demography and population viability of the regionally rare hemiparasitic plant Pedicularis lanceolata to include two other rare species.

In January 2008, in conjunction with tree harvesting on abutting Petersham Country Club property, Harvard Forest experienced illegal cutting of nearly 100 trees on its property and significant environmental damage to the surrounding forest, including a fragile vernal pool.